Google

Samsung may be the number one smartphone company in the world in terms of market shares but that is just one of the tech giant’s multiple sources of revenue. The Korean company has reportedly renewed its license payment contract with Google for the use of Google’s search bar as the default search engine on its smartphones.

The Google Feed, Google's revamp and rebrand of its "Google Now" card feed inside of the Google app, is rolling out to Android users. The Feed is mostly a new coat of paint for features that already existed, but let's cover what's here.

After so many rumors, the Nokia 8 smartphone is finally here, unveiled by HMD Global earlier today in a live event that took place in London, United Kingdom. The smartphone comes with all the latest features that one would expect from a flagship device, yet it has a pretty high price tag.

According to HMD Global, the Nokia 8 is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8998 Snapdragon 835 Octa-core (4x2.45 GHz Kryo & 4x1.9 GHz Kryo) processor and an Adreno 540 GPU, has a 5.3-inch display with a 1440x2560 resolution and approximately 554 PPI pixel density.

Google today is shipping the beta version of the upcoming Chrome 61 web-browser release.

Highlights of Chrome 61 Beta include native support for JavaScript modules, Payment Request API support in the desktop browser, support for the Web Share API for easily sharing content on social networks, and initial WebUSB support.

For over two years the WebAssembly W3C Community Group has served as a forum for browser vendors and others to come together to develop an elegant and efficient compilation target for the Web. A first version is available in 4 browser engines and is on track to become a standard part of the Web. We’ve had several successful in-person CG meetings, while continuing our robust online collaboration on github. We also look forward to engaging the wider W3C community at the WebAssembly meeting at this year’s TPAC.

In 2014, Apple still had almost half of the school market, but Google had them in its sights. By 2016, according to FutureSource, a financial markets research company, Chromebooks had a 58 percent of the education market. Despite Apple and Microsoft's best efforts, Chromebooks are continuing to dominate schools.

Why? Part of it is price. You can get a good Chromebook for a few hundred dollars. Apple has nothing in its price range. Microsoft said it was competing with its new Surface Laptop and Windows 10S, but the price alone, $999, makes it a non-starter.

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox internet browser, has begun testing a feature that lets you enter a search query using your voice instead of typing it in. The move could help Mozilla's efforts to make Firefox more competitive with Google Chrome.

If you're using Firefox in English on Mac, Windows or Linux, you can turn on the experimental "Voice Fill" feature and then use it on Google, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Support for other websites will come later.

Alphabet's Google offers speech recognition on its search engine when accessed through Chrome on desktop -- it became available in 2013 -- and Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing and Google all let you run search queries with your voice on mobile devices. But searching with your voice on Google while using Firefox on the desktop, for example, has historically been impossible. Now Mozilla wants to make its desktop browser more competitive.

Google launched today version 60 of the Chrome browser. This version brings mostly developer and API-related changes, with no changes to visible UI functions. In addition, the Chrome team also fixed 40 security issues.

The biggest of the Chrome 60 changes is the addition of the Paint Timing API, a new tool for website developers that allows them to measure the time Chrome takes to "paint" their web page.

ASUS, the Taiwanese computer and phone hardware and electronics company, announced the Chromebook Flip C213 as an ultimate future-proof education computer for IT in schools.

The ASUS Chromebook Flip C213 is designed from the group up for kids in elementary schools as it's built tough so that it can resist accidental drops and other impacts. To achieve this goal, ASUS has put a protective, military-grade rubber that uses reinforced nano-molding technology around the laptop's all four exterior edges and corners.

Open source development at Google is both very diverse and distributed. The larger projects that we release generally have dedicated teams developing and supporting the project, working with their external developer communities and providing internal support to other Googlers. Many of the smaller projects include just one or two engineers working on something experimental or just a fun, side project. While we do have a central Open Source Programs Office (the group I manage), it is relatively small compared to the size of the company. Instead, the actual development happens throughout the company, with hundreds of teams and thousands of engineers, tech writers, designers and product managers contributing to open source in some way.

EU antitrust regulators are weighing another record fine against Google over its Android mobile operating system and have set up a panel of experts to give a second opinion on the case, two people familiar with the matter said.

More in Tux Machines

How CERN Is Using Linux and Open Source

CERN really needs no introduction. Among other things, the European Organization for Nuclear Research created the World Wide Web and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which was used in discovery of the Higgs boson. Tim Bell, who is responsible for the organization’s IT Operating Systems and Infrastructure group, says the goal of his team is “to provide the compute facility for 13,000 physicists around the world to analyze those collisions, understand what the universe is made of and how it works.”

WhiteSource Rolls Out New Open Source Security Detector

WhiteSource on Tuesday launched its next-generation software composition analysis (SCA) technology, dubbed "Effective Usage Analysis," with the promise that it can reduce open source vulnerability alerts by 70 percent.
The newly developed technology provides details beyond which components are present in the application. It provides actionable insights into how components are being used. It also evaluates their impact on the security of the application.
The new solution shows which vulnerabilities are effective. For instance, it can identify which vulnerabilities get calls from the proprietary code.

Announcing “e Foundation” for eelo

I’m pleased to announce that a non-profit organization has been incorporated to support the project: e Foundation.
“e Foundation” will host core eelo assets and fuel the development of eelo software.
This non-profit organization will be able to receive private and public grants, as well as donations from individuals, from anywhere in the world. We’re also working to add a legal way so that donations could benefit from tax cuts, as it’s often possible when donating to “in the public interest” organizations.
As soon as a bank account will be ready for “e Foundation”, we will move there all donations and our “in demand” crowdfunding campaign.

RIP Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.